Over the years, some of my friends have taken mild offense at the fact that I’m not a big television watcher. When we lived in North Dakota the fact that we didn’t have a television set bothered some of our friends enough that they gave us a used set. The parsonage where we lived had recently gotten new siding and It was decided to wire the house for cable television when the siding was off of the house. The congregation paid for the utilities in the house and added cable television to the included utilities. I actually got into watching television on a fairly regular basis during that time period. I would get up with our infant daughter, change and feed her and often she would be slow to go back to sleep. I’d turn on the television and watch reruns of M*A*S*H. I don’t think anyone was offended. They just thought that I was conservative about spending money and the gift of the television set was a genuine show of support for their pastor. I suspect that the pastor who followed us in that parsonage appreciated the cable connection as well.

We bought our first television set when our children were in elementary school. There was a Christmas when a new television set and a VCR were among the gifts from Santa. I got so confused and overwhelmed shopping for that television that I walked out of one store that had dozens of models on display, all showing pictures at the same time. I don’t remember exactly how we narrowed the decision down to a single set, but we found one inside of our budget. We put it in a basement family room. It moved with us to Rapid City where we could get several channels with the antenna in the rafters of our garage. I got into the habit of watching the Red Green Show on Public Television on a fairly regular basis.

After our children grew up and moved out of the house the television wore out and replacing it wasn’t a priority for us. In the meantime how people consume television has changed quite a bit. Although we don’t have a television set, we have a computer monitor that is as big as the televisions we have owned, though not as large as the televisions hanging on the walls in many of the homes of friends. We can stream movies and watch programs on our computer, so it isn’t as if we don’t have a television at all.

A few years ago, when we were still living in Rapid City, a friend commented to me that he was a bit intimidated by the fact that I reported to not have a television. He had worked hard to develop a home theater with a large screen television and a high quality sound system and he said that it felt as if I were judging his love of television and movies to be somewhat inferior to my preference for reading books. I don’t remember ever thinking of television as a moral mark for other people. We were careful in what television we allowed our children to watch when they were growing up, but after they got to the age where they were making their own decisions about television I didn’t see anything particularly unique about not making television a priority.

I have, however, noticed that there are some settings where I don’t appreciate television. Restaurants that have multiple televisions tuned to multiple programs are places where I try to sit so that I cannot see the televisions. They are distracting to me and I’d prefer not to see whatever sports events are being displayed. I also have a dislike of nursing homes and care centers where the televisions are constantly turned on. For a while the constant presence of televisions in all sorts of medical environments was distracting for me. Televisions in waiting rooms, however, seem to be going out of favor. People watch what they want on their portable devices. There was a time when every doctor and dentist’s office had a television in the waiting room, but that seems to have passed. Televisions in care centers, however, seem to continue to be omnipresent.

When I was regularly visiting in care centers, I would occasionally turn off the televisions in the common areas. Other times, I’d turn down the volume so that we could visit without shouting. I also would often change the channel if I could find the remote controls. A constant stream of Fox news doesn’t help someone with cognitive decline to discern reality from fiction.

Even worse than the news, in my opinion, was the practice of leaving the television set tuned to the weather channel. The weather channel can almost always find some weather emergency or disaster to cover and if there isn’t a storm currently battering a place where they have reporters, they will play footage from past storms. I don’t know how many times I have concluded a visit to someone in a nursing home and they warn me about going out in the storm when there is no storm in the place I was visiting. Persons living in nursing homes often think that what they see on the television is happening in their location.

For example, Hurricane Alberto is approaching the coast of Mexico bringing heavy rains, coastal flooding, and gusty winds along the coasts of northeastern Mexico and Texas. A heat dome is bringing record temperatures to New England. And here in the Pacific Northwest we are enjoying a few days of pleasant early summer weather.

Alberto, however, tips me off to something about this year’s hurricane season. Hurricanes are named to avoid confusion if multiple storms occur simultaneously. The name lists are recycled every six years with a few changes if a storm is particularly strong or damaging. For example Katrina was removed from lists after the 2005 hurricane and Harvey was retired in 2017. Alberto signals the only list in the series with the name of one of our immediate family members. In Alberto years, Isaac is on the list and most years there are enough storms to get past I. This year is forecast to have a high number of storms, perhaps enough to move from English to Greek names after going through the entire alphabet. So storm Isaac is coming.

I don’t need a television or the weather channel to know this. I read it on the website of our local newspaper. And the last time a hurricane made landfall around here was extratropical cyclone Freda in 1962. The water off of our coast is just too cold to spawn hurricanes and those that blow north from warmer waters rarely make landfall because of our colder waters. Furthermore, Isaac is on the Atlantic list, not the Pacific list, so we won’t be seeing the storm with our son’s name around here. Instead, we get the real person which is a lot more fun.